How the World Failed Haiti

A year and a half after the island was reduced to rubble
by an earthquake, the world's unprecedented effort to
rebuild it has turned into a disaster of good intentions

by: Janet Reitman
Rolling Stone
August 4, 2011
This story is from the August 18, 2011 issue of 
Rolling Stone.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-world-failed-haiti-20110804

In March of last year, two months after the devastating
earthquake that killed 300,000 Haitians and left more
than a million homeless, Sean Penn was faced with a
monumental challenge. Penn, who had been spending most
of his time in Haiti since the quake, was running a
large camp for internally displaced persons in the
foothills of a wealthy suburb of Port-au-Prince, on what
had been the city's lone golf course. Nearly 60,000 poor
and middle-class Haitians, most from Haiti's devastated
capital, had migrated here, pouring over the crumbled
walls of the exclusive country club, and established a
spontaneous and overcrowded city of crude dwellings
fashioned from plastic sheeting.

One night, a heavy rainstorm reduced much of the golf
course to mud. Penn turned to Lt. Gen. Ken Keen,
commander of the U.S. military's Joint Task Force Haiti,
a 22,000-strong deployment, which was helping to lead
the international relief effort. Keen immediately
assigned the Army Corps of Engineers to come up with a
drainage plan. Before the work could begin, however,
some 5,000 refugees would have to leave the golf course.
The question was where to put them.

After Penn and Keen met with U.S. and Haitian officials,
it was generally agreed that the best option was to
relocate the refugees to an area roughly nine miles
north of the capital called Corail-Cesselesse, which had
recently been commandeered by the Haitian government.
The area was secure, and believed to be less vulnerable
to flooding than the makeshift camp. "It wasn't the
ideal circumstance, but it was safe," recalls Keen.
"Given the choice of living in a riverbed that was
surely going to be flooded or being safe in Corail, it
was a decision made out of necessity."

It fell to Penn to explain the situation to the
Haitians. So he took his translator and walked to the
bottom of the golf course, where some of the refugees'
leaders had gathered. The men were suspicious of Penn,
believing him to be in cahoots with Haiti's wealthy
landowners, a small and privileged elite who had ruled
the country for generations and were now trying to
forcibly evict many refugees from their land, often at
the point of a gun. To the people living in Penn's camp,
the "optional relocation" he was proposing smacked of a
prelude to a larger, mandatory exodus.

"Look," said the actor, sitting down with the Haitians
in a tent. "I don't give a fuck about the rich guys who
own this club." He didn't even want them to leave, he
said, but what was the choice? He pulled out a map of
the drainage plan the military engineers had devised.
Those ditches were a necessity, he said - without them,
thousands of people might die in a mudslide or flood.
Then he took out a Google Earth photo of Corail, a wide
swath of land, some 18,000 acres, and laid out the
proposal: Each family that agreed to move to Corail
would get $50, courtesy of the American Red Cross, and a
hygiene kit. They would also get shelter, food rations,
clean water, free medical care and a school for their
kids. And they would be first in line for jobs in
Korean-owned garment factories that the Haitian
government pledged would soon be built in the area.

"That's the plan," Penn said. "We'll step outside, you
guys decide. If it were me, I would take my kids out
there rather than stay here."

Within days, thousands of refugees had agreed to move to
Corail. On Saturday, April 10th, 2010, the first group
left the golf course in a caravan of buses, the exodus
chaperoned by United Nations peacekeepers. They arrived,
disembarking onto a dusty, cactus-strewn patch of land
in the shadow of a denuded mountain that turned out to
be as vulnerable to the elements as the golf course.
Their new homes - bright white tents set up on the
baking gravel - were both hot and flimsy; three months
after the refugees arrived, hundreds of the tents would
blow away in a heavy windstorm. There were no schools,
no markets, and the closest hospital was miles away.
There were also no jobs, as the hoped-for factories
would not be built for months - or even years. To return
to the city meant a long walk to a bus stop followed by
a several-hour commute. They were marooned.

"I went out there with our engineers, and we were all
like, 'What is this? It looks like Chad,'" recalls Julie
Schindall, a spokeswoman for the relief organization
Oxfam, which signed on to build latrines and provide
water to Corail. "I have no idea how they selected that
camp. It was all done very last minute - we had to set
the entire structure up in a week."

In the aftermath of the move, no one in the State
Department or the Haitian government seemed willing to
take responsibility for the relocation - or even for the
rationale behind it. "I've yet to see any evidence that
proves that anyone was in more danger on the golf course
than they would have been anywhere else - though
everybody in Haiti thinks they were," says a senior U.N.
official who asked not to be identified. "What the move
proved was that it's possible to 'save' 5,000 people if
you say they're in a dangerous situation and put them in
what you call a safe situation. It was the most
grotesque act of cynicism that I've seen for some time."

Penn, for one, admits that Corail was a problematic
choice. "It's a very vulnerable area," he says, adding
that he realized this immediately, having toured the
site soon after it was selected. "It struck me as
desolate, but we had an emergency, and this was an
emergency-relocation area - I never said it was anything
else," he insists. "I feel like shit. I hope those guys
are OK when it rains out there. I feel an extra
responsibility - of course I do. But we were betrayed."
Penn says he was assured by international monitors and
aid agencies that Corail was a safe place to live, and
that shelters would be built within three months. A year
later, the shelters, constructed of crude plywood, were
just being completed. There were still no hospitals and
no factory jobs: Corail, it turns out, doesn't have
enough water to supply the garment manufacturers who
promised to locate there.

But the lure of would-be jobs has driven a mass
migration of Haitians to the land abutting Corail. By
the first anniversary of the earthquake, the population
of the once-deserted territory had swelled to more than
100,000 people. "It was like the gold rush," says one
U.N. official, close to the process. "Within about a
week of people moving to Corail, you had all these other
people rushing out there to stake their claim. People
were up there buying and selling plots of land -
completely illegally." The going rate, she says, was
about $1,000 a plot.

Dubbed "Canaan," after the biblical promised land, the
Corail region is now one of Haiti's 10 largest cities,
as well as its largest and most squalid camp, a bitter
irony lost on no one involved in the relief effort.
"Corail is a ton of people living in a flux state,
without safe shelter, who don't know what the future
holds," says Schindall. "It's Haiti post-earthquake in a
nutshell."

It wasn't supposed to be this way. In the immediate
aftermath of the earthquake on January 12th, 2010, the
international community resolved not only to rebuild
Haiti, but also to establish new and more efficient
models for dispensing humanitarian aid. President Obama,
calling the tragedy "cruel and incomprehensible,"
pledged "every element of our national capacity" to the
response. Former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill
Clinton created a special fund for Haiti; the American
Red Cross launched a wildly successful appeal, raising
close to $500 million in one year. In total, an
estimated one in two American households donated more
than $1.4 billion to Haiti relief, with close to $11
billion more for reconstruction pledged by donor
countries and financial institutions. "We will be here
today, tomorrow and for the time ahead," Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton promised during a post-quake visit
to Port-au-Prince.

American and international officials gave their plan for
Haiti a simple and compelling name: Building Back
Better, a term that came into vogue after the tsunami
that struck Asia in 2004, and that has since become
something of a mantra in the development world. In a
radical shift away from traditional approaches to
foreign aid, "building back better" attempts to go
beyond simple relief and not only to rebuild shattered
structures, but to restructure, in a sense, shattered
societies. At the forefront of this effort is private-
sector investment being leveraged to build the kind of
infrastructure needed to promote economic development
and attract foreign corporations: roads, power lines,
factories, markets. "The hope," explains Matthew Bishop,
co-author of Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save
the World, "is that using the private sector will be a
lot more efficient. Traditional aid has been extremely
wasteful. When it is allowed to take the lead, the
private sector is more likely to try something new or
entrepreneurial."

But despite all that has been promised, almost nothing
has been built back in Haiti, better or otherwise.
Within Port-au-Prince, some 3 million people languish in
permanent misery, subject to myriad experiments at
"fixing" a nation that, to those who are attempting it,
stubbornly refuses to be fixed. Mountains of rubble
remain in the streets, hundreds of thousands of people
continue to live in weather-beaten tents, and cholera, a
disease that hadn't been seen in Haiti for 60 years, has
swept over the land, infecting more than a quarter
million people.

In the midst of such suffering, only a fraction of the
money devoted to Haitian relief has actually been spent.
This May, the U.S. Government Accountability Office
reported that of the $1.14 billion allocated by Congress
for Haiti last year, only $184 million has been
"obligated." In a letter to the Obama administration
this spring, 53 Democratic members of Congress blasted
the "appalling" conditions in the refugee camps. "The
unprecedented relief effort has given way to a sluggish,
at best, reconstruction effort," said Rep. Barbara Lee,
who is demanding an accounting of how the relief money
is being spent. There is, she said, a "lack of urgency
on the part of the international community."

As the relief effort has dragged on for well over a
year, virtually every actor involved has blamed the
others: U.S. aid officials pitted against Washington
bureaucrats, U.N. agencies against private aid groups.
Some veteran insiders blame a new breed of technocrats
who, with little to no experience in development, have
descended on Port-au-Prince armed with bold theories and
PowerPoint presentations, as if the entire country were
a case study from Harvard Business School. Others say
the goals were too lofty, the plans unrealistic; maybe
Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere,
was simply too damaged to be fixed. Or perhaps the very
idea of fixing Haiti at all is a flawed concept,
revealing not only the limits of Western humanitarianism
but the folly of believing that any country and its
problems are ours to set right.

Amid all the finger-pointing, however, nearly everyone
taking part in the relief effort is quick to place at
least some of the blame on the Haitians themselves.
"Corruption is the reason those reconstruction funds
haven't broken loose," says one U.S. business
consultant, who describes most Haitian politicians as
"pathological narcissists" with little interest in
helping their own country. Such accusations have been
made by outsiders for as long as outsiders have tried to
help Haiti - which itself may be the biggest problem.
"Haitian people have always found a way to get rid of
those who've tried to control them," says Raoul Peck,
Haiti's former minister of culture. "It's very easy to
point at the Haitians for being corrupt or weak. What's
much harder is looking at what's wrong with those who
say they are just trying to help."

Last fall, a line of graffiti began to appear on walls
throughout Port-au-Prince: BON RETOUR J.C. DUVALIER
("Welcome back, J.C. Duvalier"). It was a reference to
Haiti's last dictator, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier,
who, prior to being deposed in 1986, presided over a
kleptocratic police state of such paranoid dimensions
that writer Graham Greene dubbed Haiti the "Nightmare
Republic." Today, in a testament to their current-day
nightmare, some traumatized Haitians have begun to yearn
for the days of Duvalier in the same way that some
Iraqis, in the wake of the U.S. invasion, came to
idealize life under Saddam Hussein. "It's selective
memory," explains my translator, a cynical former
businessman named John. "At least with Duvalier, we had
lights."

It is a broiling November day, and John and I are
driving through the wreckage of what used to be Port-au-
Prince. Two-thirds the size of Manhattan, Haiti's
capital is still buried under some 8 million cubic
meters of rubble - enough, according to one expert, to
build a road from Port-au-Prince across the ocean to Los
Angeles and back again. Enormous piles of this debris,
some sprouting odd pieces of metal or computer parts,
now comprise much of what used to be small
neighborhoods. Choking clouds of exhaust hover above the
roads, which are clogged with idling cars as well as
people, dogs, cows, donkeys, the odd pig. Some 1,000
camps, or "informal settlements," have sprung up in
seemingly every available space in the city: vacant
lots, basketball courts, soccer fields, road medians,
the large, gated plaza in front of the prime minister's
office, even the Champs de Mars park, across from the
National Palace, home now to some 10,000 people.

Filth - whether it's human waste or the giant heaps of
rotted mango peels, empty water bottles and other refuse
that line the roads and ditches and canals - is as much
a part of life in post-earthquake Haiti as frustration
and despair. "There are things in this country you just
can't believe," one exhausted aid worker tells me. "I'm
at this river the other day, and here's what I see:
three men washing some Land Rovers in the water, two
pigs having sex, a group of children gutting some pigs
and cleaning their intestines right next to the pigs
having sex, and a few women washing clothes and bathing
- all in the same tiny part of the river. And next to
all of that was a hand-washing poster put up by some NGO
to teach people good hygiene."

Haiti's dysfunction, while undeniably exacerbated by the
quake, goes back generations. The first independent
black republic in the world, it has been hobbled for
most of the past century by a series of repressive
dictatorships and military regimes, and so dependent on
Western aid groups that since the late 1990s, it has
been known throughout the development world as "the
Republic of NGOs." The earthquake didn't so much destroy
Haitian society as it exposed how deeply broken that
society already was. In 35 seconds, the quake leveled
government ministries and the National Palace, killed an
estimated 20 percent of the country's civil servants,
and severely damaged 50 of the nation's hospitals.
Schools collapsed on their students; churches collapsed
on their clergy; and houses built into the hillsides
crumbled like sand, sliding to the bottom of the
ravines. From his home overlooking Port-au-Prince,
Charles Henri Baker, a Haitian manufacturing titan,
recalled seeing the dust rising from the city, and with
it the cries of "3 million people calling to Jesus."

During the first few days after the quake, not a single
Haitian official - not the president, the prime minister
or any cabinet member - emerged to make a public
statement. "Their excuse was they were in shock," says
Raymond Joseph, Haiti's former ambassador to the United
States. "OK, you're in shock, I understand. But act like
leaders. Summon the people, tell them something of
comfort - do something. No one did."

Over the next few weeks, the amount of aid pledged to
Haiti began to outpace the nation's ability to absorb
it. Just a few days after the quake, Doctors Without
Borders shut down its appeal for Haiti relief funds,
informing donors that it simply couldn't spend any more.
But most aid groups continued to fundraise for Haiti
long after their emergency-relief capacities were maxed
out. The American Red Cross has raised $479 million for
Haiti, for example, yet it had "spent or signed
agreements to spend" only $245 million by the one-year
anniversary of the tragedy. The rest remains in an
interest-bearing account, awaiting the commencement of
"building back better."

Aid workers in Haiti concede that their efforts remain
as focused on relief as on reconstruction. "We are
ramping up recovery - building more stable housing, a
medical infrastructure, that kind of thing - but we're
still out there digging ditches, sandbagging hillsides,
replacing tarps and tents," says Julie Sell, the Red
Cross spokeswoman for Port-au-Prince. "The relief phase,
to be honest, is still ongoing. We all wish we were
further along than we are."

Sell, like most other aid officials, is trying to put a
rational spin on a situation that is both irrational
and, by the looks of things, completely unmanageable. On
top of the earthquake, aid workers in Haiti are
contending with a cholera crisis, a disease of poverty
spread through poor sanitation and contaminated drinking
water. These are all things that NGOs like the Red Cross
have expertise in fighting, but larger structural issues
often trump their best intentions. Because international
NGOs get most of their money from large government
agencies, they are beholden to the broader policy
imperatives of their funders. "The big problem is that
most NGOs are only really accountable to their donors,
when we should really be accountable to the people we're
trying to serve," says Dr. Louise Ivers, senior health
and policy adviser for Partners in Health, a Boston-
based NGO that has worked in Haiti for 25 years. Some
organizations, she notes, "exist only to write grant
proposals that respond to specific donor requests. If
your mandate is just to follow the money, then the money
determines what happens."

The money that poured into Haiti after the earthquake
was focused almost solely on relief efforts in and
around Port-au-Prince. As a result, dozens of health-
oriented NGOs in Haiti focused their work in the
capital, all but ignoring the countryside. So last
October, when reports of people dropping dead of cholera
in the rural Artibonite Valley 90 miles from the capital
began to emerge, many in the aid community were
blindsided. Even as the epidemic made its way to Port-
au-Prince, some relief organizations still didn't
respond. "It was as if, somehow, those 400 or 500 deaths
in the Artibonite weren't registering," says Ivers, who
had an office in St. Marc, where the outbreak started.
"If you haven't really seen it with your own eyes, it's
hard to believe how quickly cholera can become a major
catastrophe." Within a month, cholera had become a
national epidemic.

One morning, during the height of the epidemic, I attend
a meeting organized by the U.N. to coordinate efforts to
contain the cholera outbreak. About 60 relief workers
from groups like Oxfam, the World Health Organization,
UNICEF, the American Red Cross and Save the Children
crowd the small room at the offices of Haiti's ministry
of water and sanitation, sitting on tables or on the
floor. There is a representative from USAID and another
from the Centers for Disease Control. There are also a
few U.N. peacekeepers and a U.S. Army captain in
Oakleys. There are only a handful of Haitians in the
room, half of whom are translators.

The meeting, which is held in French, begins with a
PowerPoint presentation on the scope of the cholera
epidemic, conducted by a frazzled aid official named
Pierre-Yves Rochât. Word has come down from the Haitian
health ministry that there are only 800 cholera cases in
Port-au-Prince, a number everyone in the room knows is a
lie. "They're dropping like flies," a CDC official
whispers. At one hospital on the outskirts of town,
there were 1,200 cases in a single day.

Much of the meeting is spent complaining. An official
from an international aid agency notes that Port-au-
Prince is now overflowing with waste, yet 52 disposal
trucks that have been imported to handle it are still
sitting in customs. Another says that waste from
cholera-treatment centers has been dumped at the
Truitier landfill, which happens to be located on a
major aquifer. Rodrigo Silva, a Portuguese waste-
management specialist, offers what seems like a
reasonable proposal: Perhaps the NGOs should consider
composting the cholera waste instead of dumping it. In
unison, officials from Doctors Without Borders, the Pan
American Health Organization and UNICEF shoot him down,
insisting that chlorine, an extremely effective
bacteria-killer, is the only sensible option to
neutralize cholera waste. Dejected, Silva leaves the
room.

I find him outside smoking a cigarette. A skinny guy in
his early thirties, Silva has been in Haiti for months
trying to initiate projects that rely on "ecological
sanitation," which many development specialists advocate
for undeveloped countries like Haiti. So far, though,
Silva has had almost no luck except with small NGOs like
Give Love, founded by the actress Patricia Arquette. "I
go to these meetings, and everybody's talking about
problems, not solutions," he says. "I try to make
suggestions, but no one listens. I don't know why."

In the end, nothing is decided. After two hours, the aid
workers, who have spent most of the meeting arguing,
make a dash for the door, getting into their cars to sit
for hours in Port-au-Prince's traffic en route to the
next meeting. These weekly gatherings, which are
designed to streamline relief efforts, wind up seeming
like an exercise in futility. "What sucks is that we
spend all of our time sitting in traffic going to all of
these meetings," says one veteran aid worker, who has
been working in Haiti for a year, "and wasting even more
hours of our day when we could be doing something else -
like helping Haiti."

Many of the decisions about how best to help Haiti, in
fact, were conceived well before the earthquake struck.
In the spring of 2009, Hillary Clinton, having recently
assumed her post as secretary of state, identified Haiti
as a top priority. Both she and Bill Clinton shared a
deep and difficult history with the country. The former
president "fell in love" with the island during his
honeymoon there in 1975, and the Clinton homes in New
York and Washington were decorated with Haitian art. But
his policies only drove the country deeper into despair.
Clinton imposed harsh sanctions on the island after its
democratically elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide,
was deposed by a military coup in 1991. He also backed
an ambitious program of "structural adjustment" designed
by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to
turn Haiti into a Caribbean Taiwan, refocusing its
resources away from farming toward more lucrative
sectors like export manufacturing. It was known as the
"American Plan."

The strategy was a disaster. Small farms were crushed by
a sudden influx of subsidized food imported from the
United States. No longer able to sell their produce,
hundreds of thousands of peasants were driven off their
farms and into the cities and shantytowns, mostly in
Port-au-Prince, where they competed for jobs at
American-owned assembly plants, earning less than $2 a
day. Last year, Clinton apologized for the plan. "We
made this devil's bargain, and it wasn't the right thing
to do," he said. "It was a mistake that I was a party
to. I did that. I have to live every day with the
consequences."

The earthquake, say some involved with the relief
effort, seemed to offer Clinton a chance to make amends.
"Personally, I think Bill Clinton wants to redeem
himself," says Joseph, Haiti's former ambassador. "He
realizes he made mistakes. So now, if he can do
something good for Haiti, leave a legacy, then he can
say, OK, I cleared my name."

In the fall of 2008, a year and a half before the
earthquake, Clinton appealed to world leaders and other
members of his Clinton Global Initiative to help Haiti
recover from a series of devastating hurricanes. By the
end of the year, CGI members had committed more than
$100 million to Haiti relief. The U.N., which had
launched its own appeal, raised less than half that
amount.

In the winter of 2009, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-
moon invited Clinton to Haiti, and soon afterward asked
him to serve as his special envoy, using his unique
brand of star power and political clout to garner much-
needed investments for the country. It was a job Clinton
had done before, drumming up aid after the catastrophic
tsunami in Asia. In Haiti, he hoped to do even more.
"Clinton had this idea of a grid," one adviser recalls.
"He was going to figure out what all the needs were in
Haiti, chart them, and then match them up with the
people who had the money. The idea was to get every base
covered, to fill in all those boxes, not just the ones
that were sexy. And he thought he could do it quickly."

In Washington, meanwhile, Hillary Clinton was pursuing a
Haiti strategy that dovetailed neatly with her husband's
efforts. Within the State Department, Haiti was viewed,
in the words of one official, as a "laboratory": a petri
dish in which America could prove that it could be a
force for good in the world. The impulse falls squarely
within the Clinton doctrine known as "smart power,"
which stresses the importance of diplomacy and
development to further U.S. interests. For too long,
Clinton believed, the West had embraced "development for
development's sake," throwing money at poor countries
without demanding either accountability or results.
Haiti had received so much foreign assistance over the
years - more than $300 million annually from the U.S.
alone - that it had become a virtual, albeit
dysfunctional, ward of the West, and a poster child for
the inadequacies of foreign aid.

In April 2009, Clinton ordered a thorough review of U.S.
policy toward Haiti. She wanted a new strategy grounded
in "evidence-based solutions." "The idea," recalls
Cheryl Mills, Clinton's chief of staff, "was that if
we're putting in the assistance, we need to know what
the outcomes are going to be."

Mills was chosen by Clinton to steer the review. An
elegant, 46-year-old graduate of Stanford Law School,
Mills was as strong a Clinton loyalist as anyone in
Washington. She had worked in the White House office of
legal counsel throughout Bill's presidency, defending
him during his impeachment hearing. She also served as
Hillary's chief counsel and unofficial campaign manager
during her 2008 presidential campaign. "If something's
on the other side of a brick wall and the Clintons need
it," said one former White House colleague, "she'll find
a way to get to it: over, around or through."

But Mills, to some minds, was a questionable choice to
lead what became the State Department's Haiti Task
Force. She had no prior experience in international
development, nor did she think she needed it. Her role,
as she saw it, was as a problem solver: In order to come
up with the best policy possible, the United States
needed to maximize its resources, cut costs and leverage
the expertise of as many people as it could, including
those in the private sector.

"Cheryl Mills came in and started asking very hard
questions, like 'Why is it that we've put all this money
and all this time into Haiti and gotten nothing out of
it?'" recalls Robert Maguire, chairman of the Haiti
Working Group at the U.S. Institute of Peace, who was
part of a kitchen cabinet of experts who met with Mills
to discuss Haiti policy. Mills was appalled, Maguire
recalls, by the abysmal record of U.S. aid in Haiti, and
was particularly critical of the NGOs, many of which had
spent decades there without producing any lasting
change. She was unhappy that so much money was
outsourced to private development agencies, whose
accomplishments rarely justified their exorbitant fees.
Mills was also frustrated with the inflexibility of
development purists in accepting new ideas.

The purists, in turn, criticized Mills as a political
operative who, for all of her good intentions, was "not
qualified to engineer sophisticated development
approaches to Haiti," as one puts it. Maguire, however,
was impressed. "This old, established system had been
deficient in the worst possible way, and Cheryl was
determined to figure out a new way of doing things that
would be more effective, both for the U.S. and for
Haiti," he says. "She was not accepting business as
usual. And because of that, she stepped on a lot of
toes."

Mills was particularly unpopular at USAID, the long-
troubled, deeply understaffed agency that has been at
the helm of development programs for the past five
decades. Since the end of the Cold War, USAID has
suffered tremendous budget cuts that have resulted in
its role being almost entirely absorbed by the State
Department, which controls its budget. For those at
USAID who resented this loss of autonomy, Mills became a
symbol of their agency's emasculation. To those she
favored, Mills could be warm, funny, witty and
supportive. But like the Clintons, she could also be
vindictive to those who crossed her. "I don't doubt that
Cheryl means well," says one State Department official,
"but she scares the shit out of everyone."

During the summer and fall of 2009, Mills dispatched
several teams of experts to Haiti to assess the best
investment options. They paid particular attention to a
strategy drawn up by Oxford University economist Paul
Collier, who maintained that with its low-paid workforce
and loose labor regulations, Haiti could become a major
supplier for the apparel industry. The ideas weren't
dissimilar from the policies that had been foisted on
Haiti as far back as the Duvalier era. "That same model
of T-shirt manufacturing was tried in the 1970s, and was
an utter failure," notes a U.N. official. "The entire
model is based on paying people so little that it
doesn't activate the economy. It keeps the labor force
subsisting, but there's not enough surplus in their
salaries to do more than keep their family alive."

Mills nonetheless embraced Collier's idea, as did Bill
Clinton, who made a special trip to Haiti in the fall of
2009, escorting international CEOs around Haiti's farms
and factories and promoting its tourism potential.
Manufacturing, Clinton believed, was "a great
opportunity, not only for investors to come and make a
profit but for the people of Haiti to have a more secure
and a more broadly shared, prosperous future." He also
envisioned a myriad of other possibilities, from tourist
hotels to outsourced call centers.

By that Christmas, Mills and her team had identified
four key pillars for aid - health, energy, agriculture
and security - that promised what seemed like the
highest return, and were preparing to send a report on
the new Haiti strategy to the National Security Council
for review. Bill Clinton's hands-on approach had also
begun to pay off: Two international hotel chains had
committed to projects in Haiti, and new industrial parks
were in the works with interest from American, South
Korean and Irish investors. The Vietnamese military was
in negotiations to buy a controlling share of Haiti's
state-owned telephone company, and the Hotel Montana in
Port-au-Prince was making plans to open a shopping
arcade.

Then came the earthquake. The tragedy put "a dent in
expectations," as one State Department official puts it,
but it "didn't completely destroy the underlying
economic opportunities." Immediately after the quake, in
fact, Bill Clinton was not only talking about Haiti's
reconstruction but was casting the tragedy as an
opportunity for the country to "re-imagine" itself,
using a modified version of the Collier plan that had
already been endorsed by both the U.S. and Haitian
governments. "Is this going to be hard? Yes," Clinton
said in a teary-eyed interview with The Miami Herald.
"Do I think we can do it? Absolutely, I do."

Around the same time, Hillary Clinton met in Montreal
with representatives from a long list of donor countries
and financial institutions to begin to plan for Haiti's
reconstruction. Bill Clinton, meanwhile, attended the
world economic forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he
appealed to private-sector leaders to invest in Haiti as
part of what Clinton and others would call a new
"Marshall Plan." A 56-page document, known as the
"Action Plan for National Recovery and Development," was
released in March 2010. Its author was Haitian Prime
Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, a European-educated
technocrat, well liked by the international donors, with
support from officials at the World Bank and the U.N.
The vision represented a radically overhauled Haiti: a
country bursting with mango-processing plants, fish
farms, solar-powered irrigation facilities, industrial
parks and duty-free zones, financed, to a large degree,
by the private sector. "The plan suggests social
engineering on a vast scale," noted The Washington Post,
"which would involve levels of public and private
investment in Haiti never really imagined before."

Leslie Voltaire, a former Haitian minister and U.N.
envoy who consulted on the plan, put it more succinctly.
"Disaster," he said, "is a terrible thing to waste."

Shortly after the recovery plan was unveiled, the
Haitian government announced the creation of the Interim
Haiti Recovery Commission, a new oversight body charged
with managing the reconstruction. Though its members
were roughly split between Haitian officials and
international donors, it was clear from the outset that
Bill Clinton, who was appointed co-chair, would drive
the IHRC. "There is a degree of political pressure that
only President Clinton, and Secretary Clinton, can exert
on the Haitian government," says Sam Worthington, the
CEO of InterAction, a consortium of American-based
relief organizations. "It's a crucial role, and Bill
Clinton is at his best when he plays it."

Bill Clinton was already a major donor in Haiti,
bestowing hefty grants through both the Clinton Bush
Haiti Fund and the William J. Clinton Foundation. Now,
as co-chair of the IHRC, he would have final approval,
with Prime Minister Belle-rive, of every major
reconstruction project. It was an extraordinarily
powerful position for a single person to hold. It was
also, to many minds in both Washington and Port-au-
Prince, the best possible arrangement given the
circumstances. "Bill Clinton is the most powerful
advocate that Haiti is ever going to have," says Johnny
Celestin, a Haitian-American investor who heads a
private philanthropy called the Haitian Fund for
Innovation. "We can't let this opportunity pass."

Still, handing over that much power to Clinton made
others nervous. "Behind closed doors, the feeling of the
Haitian government was this was just another foreign
group they'd given permission to come in and take over
their country," says a senior international aid
official. "But what could they do? The Haitian
government knew it didn't have the capacity to tackle
this reconstruction on its own."

Much of the work of coordinating the recovery effort
fell to Cheryl Mills and Rajiv Shah, the newly appointed
head of USAID. Neither Mills nor Shah, a 38-year-old
physician and food-security expert who had worked for
the Gates Foundation, had any disaster-response
experience. Shah, in fact, had been at his post in the
State Department less than two weeks when the earthquake
hit. "It all happened so fast. You do your absolute best
and listen and try to make the right decisions," says
Shah, who had received an orientation to USAID's
emergency response "situation room" the day before the
earthquake. "The initial goal was to save lives, move
quickly, and be coordinated and aggressive in the
response. If you look at the response from early January
to the middle of March, it all came together in a pretty
coordinated way, given the challenges."

Moving beyond emergency relief, though, proved next to
impossible. Aid groups were maddeningly disorganized,
and the Haitian government was overwhelmed. While
President René Préval had given the recovery commission
the authority to oversee the reconstruction, final
approval on every project had to be given by Haitian
ministries, most of which were so broken that they could
barely support a staff. "There just aren't a lot of
talented bureaucrats," says an aide to Bill Clinton.
"And the ones they do have are so busy putting out day-
to-day fires, they don't have time to do any planning."

The dysfunction, say reconstruction officials, was like
nothing they'd ever seen. "I wish I could organize a
trip of Tea Party activists and take them to Haiti, so
they could see what happens if they have a country with
no government," says Earl Kessler, an urban-disaster
consultant for USAID. A central complaint was the lack
of strategy: The "Action Plan," while laying out the
core priorities for Haiti's recovery, didn't go into
many specifics. That left it up to Haiti's ministries to
devise their own plans. Some, like the health and
agriculture ministries, came up with robust strategies.
But in other key areas - housing, debris removal, waste
management - nothing happened. Some Haitian ministers
simply refused to pick up the phone; others demanded
large payoffs before they'd sign off even on small
plans.

"I've had two ministers come up to me this week,
personally, and ask what's in it for them," says a
frustrated IHRC official. "But that's how this game gets
played down here. He who has the most money buys the
best minister, and gets the work. And since money grows
on trees in this disaster, the attitude among Haitian
officials is: Just call up your buddies in Washington,
and they'll send another check."

Then there was another major obstacle to reconstruction:
the Haitian ruling class, a handful of prominent
industrial families that collectively control most of
the country's wealth. Haiti's elite has maintained
dominance for generations through strategic alliances
with Haitian politicians who provide lucrative
government contracts in exchange for patronage. Some of
those same influential Haitians owned much of the land
now needed to house refugees - and with national
elections coming up that November, government officials
weren't going to alienate their major benefactors.
"Préval wasn't about to go around seizing up property,"
says a U.N. official who has spent much of the past year
trying to find land for resettlement camps. "It became
readily apparent that he was not going to do anything to
offend his supporters."

With the Haitian government in disarray, some 98 percent
of foreign aid was directed to partners more trusted by
donors - mostly to the NGOs, which had worked in Haiti
for years. But these groups, while experienced in
relief, were not as knowledgeable about what it takes to
rebuild a nation. "I got a call from a U.N. agency
asking me how to buy equipment for rubble removal,"
recalls Michael Wyrick, vice president of the Haiti
Recovery Group, a disaster-recovery firm that has been
vying for debris-removal contracts in Haiti. "These guys
were essentially planning to start a new company: They
were looking to purchase equipment, hire management
personnel, rent office space. Much of the money on these
contracts to NGOs goes to their overhead. Before long,
you've spent tens of millions, and what's really been
done?"

Things weren't moving much faster in Washington. Cheryl
Mills had marginalized many of the bona fide experts on
Haiti at USAID, leaving her with a random assortment of
aid officials, many from far-off posts like Panama and
South Africa. For insight, she scoured the research on
previous recoveries: How long did it take for the debris
to be cleared after the tsunami in Indonesia? What about
Katrina? It took more than two years to remove the
rubble from Ground Zero, she learned from her reading,
and the World Trade Center still wasn't rebuilt. While
aid officials with long experience in disaster relief
understood that Haiti would be a five- or 10-year
effort, Mills, without prior experience in disasters,
had no idea what was "normal" in such a situation.

"There are a few things you must do in disaster relief,"
says John Simon, the former U.S. ambassador to the
African Union and an undersecretary at USAID during the
Bush administration. "The first is to establish a clear
chain of command; the second is to establish a
gatekeeper function that tells everybody - other than
those people who know what they're doing - to get out of
the way. There are a number of very competent and
experienced people at USAID who know how to do this work
and could have easily done the job. Unfortunately, what
you seem to have had with Haiti is a lot of new people
who were not in the business of disaster relief and who
took this as an opportunity to learn."

By the spring of 2010, it had become clear to many
observers that imposing a lack of expertise on a
situation that required a tremendous amount of it had
become a hallmark of the State Department's "results"
strategy. There was significant grumbling in aid
circles, for example, when the department awarded a $1.5
million contract to a New York-based consulting firm
called Dalberg Global Development Advisors. Glenn
Smucker, an anthropologist who specializes in Haiti, was
asked to brief the Dalberg team, which included several
summer associates from Harvard Business School. "They
were nice people, but they struck me as naive about
Haiti," he says. "They asked the appropriate questions
and were eager to learn, but from what I gathered, they
had never lived overseas, didn't have any disaster
experience or any background in urban planning, and
they'd never carried out any program activities on the
ground. Only one of them spoke any French. They were
being asked to do extremely important things that they
had no background to do."

One of Dalberg's assignments was to do an assessment of
a broad, bow-tie-shaped swath of land near the Corail
camp, where thousands of Haitians had moved earlier that
spring. Even as refugees were streaming onto the land
and establishing squatter camps, the State Department
hoped to create new communities in the area as part of
an attempt to depopulate Port-au-Prince. It was the
second time in three months that consultants had
assessed the area, and after Dalberg was finished, a
team of experts from USAID was brought in to reassess
the assessments. "One of the sites they said was
habitable was actually a small mountain," says Bill
Vastine, one of the experts on the USAID team. "It had
an open-mined pit on one side of it, a severe 100-foot
vertical cliff, and ravines." After looking at the
photos in Dalberg's report, he said, "it became clear
that these people may not even have gotten out of their
SUVs." The process of assessments and reassessments
dragged on for months. In the end, only one of the six
sites approved by Dalberg was deemed viable for
relocation.

Vastine says the entire process could have been avoided
if USAID had simply relied on its own surveys of the
area, which had been done on a regular basis for the
past 50 years. "I kept telling these State Department
people to go and look in their frickin' filing cabinets,
but it fell on deaf ears," he says. "It was truly
astonishing to me. The amount of previous study on Haiti
is immense. But there was no reflection on the existing
knowledge base. Instead, they would go out and hire some
company to the tune of half a million dollars to barge
in equipment from the United States and go punch some
holes in the ground, even though we already knew what
was down there. Then they'd hire some Ph.D. to study it
for six months and do a PowerPoint presentation. Haiti
doesn't need any more Ph.D.s to study it. What it needs
are some professionals who know what they're doing to go
out and do the goddamn work and rebuild it."

Vastine is sitting in the IHRC's headquarters, a large
Quonset hut on the grounds of the former U.S. Embassy
compound in downtown Port-au-Prince. The place feels
like a deserted wind tunnel. A year after the quake,
only half of the IHRC's core posts had been filled,
making it almost impossible to assess, let alone
approve, reconstruction proposals. Within its first
year, the IHRC greenlighted just 86 proposals, many of
which had been in the works before the quake. When I
meet Vastine just before Thanksgiving, he tells me that
he had arrived at work that morning to find a
"strategically placed dead body" lying in the street
just outside the compound. "Kind of says it all, don't
it?" he says.

Bill Clinton, by all accounts, was equally frustrated
with the slow progress of reconstruction. But Clinton
himself did not become the semipermanent presence many
Haitians had assumed he would. Instead, Clinton's role
was taken on, to a large extent, by staffers with little
background in development or disaster management. Laura
Graham, Clinton's 38-year-old chief of staff and chief
point person for Haiti, was his former White House
scheduler. Clinton's director of foreign policy, 34-
year-old Amitabh Desai, had been one of Hillary
Clinton's legislative aides, and before that an intern
in Ted Kennedy's office. "It was a dual problem,
really," a U.N. official says of the Clinton Foundation
staffers. "First, they had no background in development
- they didn't know what they were talking about in aid
or humanitarianism. Second, they didn't even realize it.
They had come to Haiti in their suits convinced they
were going to fix the place, and then they looked really
confused when we would try to explain to them why the
ideas they came up with on the back of an envelope on
the plane over wouldn't work."

Graham maintains that the Clinton Foundation has
"extensive experience in post-crisis management and
development." The foundation's role, she adds, "is to
assist the Haitians, not to prescribe or implement
solutions unilaterally." But on the ground in Haiti,
Clinton's surrogates managed to alienate almost everyone
with whom they came into contact. "When you listen to
President Clinton, his rhetoric is right on point," says
a prominent Haitian. "But his people were incredibly
arrogant; they knew nothing about Haiti or Haitians.
They acted like, because they worked for a former
president, they ruled the world." In one incident, he
says, Haitian ministers were shut out of an IHRC board
meeting after a Clinton staffer told them their names
were not on the list. "These are the ministers of Haiti
- it's their country! What do you mean 'not on the
list'?"

U.S. officials, while acknowledging shortcomings in the
relief effort, insist they have made the best of a
tragic situation. "No effort of this scope will be
perfect, and certainly, we would like to see even more
progress, but our commitment is ongoing and we are
determined to produce long-term results," says a senior
State Department official who refused to speak for
attribution. "It is natural to feel impatient - we are,
too - but there has been considerable progress,
particularly given the magnitude of the challenge and
Haiti's history."

Sean Penn also defends the State Department's efforts
and believes the reconstruction effort is about to turn
a corner. "Cheryl Mills is one of the most valuable
players in Haiti," he says. "She has made an incredible
impact despite the things that have gone wrong. She's
out there pushing people's buttons, and she has been
able to get things done when others couldn't. Cheryl
Mills is someone Haiti needs right now."

Penn himself, by most accounts, has been one of the most
effective players in Haiti. Some celebrities who threw
themselves into the relief effort, like Wyclef Jean,
quickly discovered that even the best-intentioned
efforts to mobilize resources can go disastrously wrong,
undermined by mismanagement and corruption. But Penn,
who arrived in Haiti a week after the earthquake with a
team of doctors and rescue workers he had rounded up,
forged a bond with both the U.S. military and with Dr.
Paul Farmer, the well-known advocate for Haiti's poor.
At first, many veteran relief workers were wary of Penn.
"For all the usual reasons, I was skeptical of a movie
star working in Haiti," admits Ivers, the senior health
and policy adviser for Farmer's organization. "I doubted
his motivation, and I was frustrated that I couldn't do
what he was able to do." But Penn soon impressed Ivers
and others with his ability to break through
bureaucracy, and humanitarian officials now refer to his
golf-course settlement, with its hospital, school, well-
maintained water and sanitation, as a "five-star camp."

Such individual efforts, however, have not been enough
to help the 680,000 Haitians who remain stranded in
temporary camps. Tim Schwartz, an American
anthropologist who was doing a housing survey for USAID,
recalls a meeting of key development officials he
attended in October, 10 months after the earthquake
struck. "USAID basically announced that the mission was
failing," he says. At the rate they were going, U.S.
officials observed, it was going to cost $1.2 billion to
keep Haitians in the camps like Corail for another year.
"They were blowing through the money, and they couldn't
afford to maintain the system like it was," Schwartz
says. "They desperately wanted to get out from under
this."

Many USAID officials wanted to return Haitians to their
homes, a project that would require rebuilding close to
100,000 damaged houses that were still considered
salvageable. To begin the project, the government hired
Kit Miyamoto, a California structural engineer, who
assessed the damage and trained Haitian builders to
begin the repairs. "People don't want to be in the camps
- they want to get the hell out of there," Miyamoto
says. "What they are looking for is assistance to make
their homes more secure. There are people lining up to
come back to repaired houses." In fact, he adds, every
person whose house was fixed left the camps and returned
home.

But only a few thousand such homes, as of May, had been
repaired, and millions of dollars have meanwhile been
diverted to other "shelter solutions." At one U.N.
meeting in Haiti, everything from earthen huts to vinyl-
sided igloos were proposed as part of a grand project to
reimagine Port-au-Prince. With the streets still buried
in mountains of rubble, some planners even floated ideas
for "model communities" that would include high-rise
apartment towers, walking paths, ample green spaces and
tennis courts. It was as unrealistic as it was
predictable. "Everyone comes to Haiti with some kind of
plan to 'save' it and do all these nice things for the
poor people," says Schwartz. "But it never works. You're
never going to turn Port-au-Prince into Santa Barbara."

Increasingly, aid workers and experts like Schwartz
watched as plans for new communities were proposed and
then scratched - sometimes because the land was not
available, other times for more prosaic reasons.
Sanitation remains a major problem. There is no
functioning waste system outside of Haiti's cities,
making toilets that rely on water impossible. In the
Croix de Bouquets area near Port-au-Prince, where USAID
intended to build dozens of small dwellings known as
"core homes," planners had come up with an alternative
solution - compost toilets - but USAID wouldn't accept
it. "They claimed it didn't comply with U.S. codes,"
recalls Vastine, who spent months working on the
project. "But you cannot provide the kind of toilet
mechanisms we have in the U.S. in most parts of Haiti.
Simply to build the infrastructure would cost tens of
millions of dollars." The entire "core home" project,
which cost $53 million, according to Vastine, wound up
spending about a third of the money trying to replicate
American-style toilets for Haitian refugees. "It was
ridiculous," says Vastine.

It was also telling. "You have to wonder what is going
on here," says Alisa Keesey, the program director of
Give Love, an NGO that focuses exclusively on sanitation
issues. "Millions of dollars were spent on the
predevelopment of that project. What did they think
they'd do - give people pit latrines, then suck out the
waste and put it in the ocean? The big question is how
serious they really are about 'building Haiti back
better' - because at this rate, they're building back
exactly the same, with bigger and better slums."

In 1994, when I first visited Haiti, Port-au-Prince was
a city of 750,000. By 2010, the population had ballooned
to 3 million. People lived practically anywhere, often
building small homes on the sides of the hills. This was
easy to do, given Haiti's lax building codes - even the
hills of Pétionville, once an exclusive enclave, were
filled with deeply impoverished neighborhoods known as
bidonvilles, inhabited by far more people than the
terrain could support.

One area that was particularly devastated by the
earthquake was Ravine Pintade, a densely populated
community built directly into a rocky slope. Two-thirds
of the homes in Ravine Pintade were destroyed, and many
of the surviving homes were in need of extensive repair.
This presents a unique opportunity to "give people
something they've never had," Ann Lee, the American
field-office director for CHF International, the NGO
that has been working most diligently in Ravine Pintade,
tells me one day. We are walking through the area,
across precarious cliffs that, on closer inspection,
turn out to be the remains of decimated homes. The place
looks like a bomb site. But within a year, Lee pledges,
CHF and other NGOs will have turned Ravine Pintade into
a functioning community with clean water, trees and
footpaths.

Haitians have grown accustomed to greeting such bold
promises with skepticism: Although CHF has been meeting
on the project since June 2010, the rebuilding progress
in Ravine Pintade has been painstakingly slow. Lee
admits that the organization, a vast NGO with relief
operations in 25 countries around the world, has never
done "micro-urban planning," as she calls it - nor have
the half dozen or so other NGOs planning similar
projects in Port-au-Prince. "It's a complete learning
experience for all of us," she says. All that's needed
to make the project a reality, she adds, are more funds.

Critics regard such claims with amusement: CHF, which
works out of two spacious mansions in Port-au-Prince and
maintains a fleet of brand-new vehicles, is generally
considered one of the most ostentatious NGOs in Haiti.
It is also one of the largest USAID contractors in Haiti
and enjoys a cozy relationship with Washington: Its
president and CEO, David Weiss, is a former State
Department official and lobbyist. "There is a shocking
lack of transparency and accountability in aid, and it's
crystallized in this relief effort," says Schwartz, the
anthropologist. "For an NGO in Haiti, the criteria for
success is raising money, filling out paperwork and
making sure the money is 'accounted for' - meaning they
can show donors that they spent the money. But nobody
goes out there and judges the project, or even verifies
that the project exists. In the majority of the cases,
nobody even talks to the community."

Bertin Voise, a 30-year-old carpenter, lives with his
wife and five other members of his family in the
courtyard of what was once a spacious home in Ravine
Pintade. It is now marked with a giant red "X,"
signifying that it is not only irreparable but a hazard.
Standing outside his broken house, Voise tells us that
he has every intention of rebuilding it, as soon as he
has enough money. This clearly bothers Lee, who has just
finished explaining how CHF wants to raze houses like
his and replace them with two-story steel-framed plywood
shelters. While the construction of new homes is taking
place, Lee wants to move everyone into temporary
shelters in the area - what she calls "T-shelter
hotels." She seems excited by the idea. Voise, who would
have to relinquish his four-bedroom home for one
slightly larger than a doghouse, is unmoved.

"Most of these NGO people genuinely dupe themselves into
thinking this is really going to work," says Schwartz,
who spent six months on a USAID-funded survey of Port-
au-Prince's housing. What he found is that roughly 85
percent of Haiti's damaged homes, including those deemed
irreparable, have been reinhabited by people who either
returned to them from the camps or, as with Bertin
Voise, never bothered to leave them in the first place,
despite warnings that a strong storm could collapse what
remains of the structures. Such a disaster, notes
Schwartz, could be avoided if money were invested in
repairing the homes rather than replacing them. "We have
to listen to these people," he says. "They are telling
us what they want, and we are ignoring it. That's the
real tragedy."

What Haitians want most are jobs. Even as people
languish in the camps in Port-au-Prince, the U.S. has
increasingly worked to expand economic opportunity
outside of the capital. Last year, Secretary Clinton,
through Cheryl Mills, worked for months to broker a deal
with Sae-A, a Korean garment manufacturer that had
expressed interest in building an industrial park in
Haiti to manufacture clothes for Gap and other clients.
In January, a day before the one-year -anniversary of
the earthquake, the State Department announced that a
deal had been reached to build the park in the northern
Haiti "export zone" near Cap Haitien. The park promised
20,000 new jobs. "I know a couple places in America that
would commit mayhem to get 20,000 jobs today," Bill
Clinton said at the signing ceremony, flanked by Prime
Minister Bellerive and the chairman of Sae-A.

In Port-au-Prince, however, the one true achievement of
"building back better" was engineered not by the Haitian
government or the IHRC or the State Department, but by
Haiti's largest employer - the telecommunications giant
Digicel. The company's founder, Denis O'Brien, is a
major Clinton Foundation contributor and chairman of the
Clinton Global Initiative's Haiti Action Network, a
consortium of largely private-sector partners who have
committed more than $224 million to reconstruction
projects. In February 2010, only a month after the
earthquake, O'Brien embarked on a project to rebuild the
Iron Market, a 120-year-old marketplace in downtown
Port-au-Prince, contributing $12 million of his own
money to do so. The project took just 11 months. Bill
Clinton, who has cast O'Brien as the model
philanthrocapitalist, lauded the Irish billionaire as a
"catalyst" for positive change. The reconstructed
landmark was the only project "of any scale" to be
completed in Haiti, said John McAslan, a British
architect whose firm worked to restore the Iron Market.
"It's amazing it's been so fast," he said. "It could
have taken five years without such a determined client."

As such, the Iron Market, an ode to commerce and
entrepreneurial drive, is also a pointed symbol of the
disproportionate influence that foreign corporations
wield over the future of Haiti. Under what might be
called the "New American Plan," reconstruction is driven
not primarily by the dictates of democracy but by the
demands of the bottom line. "Ultimately it all comes
down to governance," says Bishop, the co-author of
Philanthrocapitalism. "There was this tremendous
outpouring of goodwill after the earthquake, and this
idea of 'build back better' caught on - but for all
their consultations, no one really found out what the
Haitian people's concept of build back better actually
was."

In the absence of government leadership, Digicel has
become an influential force in Haiti. The company, which
arrived in the country only five years ago, is now its
largest taxpayer. It has also built its own
infrastructure, outside of the government's purview,
constructing roads to and from its various sites, and
powering its reception towers with generators whose
annual diesel costs run into the millions. With more
than $400 million invested in Haiti, Digicel is now
expanding its brand by building schools, distributing
tents, providing cholera-education materials and
sponsoring contests to promote Haitian entrepreneurship.
Digicel's bright-red banners and logos are far more
prominent than any other symbol in Haiti - even more,
it's often been said, than the Haitian flag. Throughout
Port-au-Prince and its refugee camps, Digicel salesmen
drawn from the ranks of the homeless operate thriving
businesses. In Sean Penn's camp, for example, one
enterprising Digicel representative has set up a
cellphone-repair shop under a tree.

"People love Digicel," says Schwartz, "and that's
because Digicel is involved in the community. They
sponsor a soccer team, they have parties, and they make
a lot of money, but they also connect with the
Haitians." Recently, Digicel started giving free phone
credit to people who make a tremendous number of calls,
often to relatives in the United States. "If Digicel
could run for president of Haiti," says Schwartz, "it
would win."

The man who was actually elected president in April -
the 50-year-old singer Michel "Sweet Micky" Martelly -
also offers an indication of how little control Haitians
are likely to have over their own future. The United
States, along with Canada and the European Union,
invested roughly $29 million in the elections, pushing
for a recount when Martelly, viewed by many as the
people's choice, was edged out by a rival, government-
backed candidate in the first round. The recount was
needed, Cheryl Mills explained at the time, to ensure
that the people of Haiti got "the kind of leadership
that they need in the future." Martelly also received
robust support from Digicel and other private-sector
interests.

A political novice sometimes described as the Ronald
Reagan of Haitian politics, Martelly was an unorthodox
if telling candidate to lead the new Haiti. An imposing
man with a striking bald head, he was a celebrity who
used his star power to appeal to Haitians across a wide
political spectrum. Martelly made his name singing
kompa, an Afro-Caribbean genre beloved throughout the
country. For years, he'd been one of the most popular
entertainers in Haiti, famous for his rum-swilling
Carnival act, in which he would pull down his pants,
make crude remarks about women and dance in a kilt.
Openly disdainful of Haitian politics, he admitted to
having smoked pot and crack cocaine in the past. His
anti-establishment rhetoric appealed to Haitian youth
fed up with the status quo. But Martelly, who had
supported the military coups that had twice overthrown
the democratically elected leftist government of Jean-
Paul Aristide, was also attractive to right-wing
Haitians and Duvalierists, embracing distinctly
authoritarian policies like reinstating the Haitian
army, an organization responsible for years of
brutality.

To Mills and others in the Obama administration,
Martelly seemed to be a man of action. "There was a
great deal of frustration among international actors
that the current Haitian administration couldn't just
take land under eminent domain to dump rubble or build
housing," says Maguire, the chairman of the Haiti
Working Group. "Martelly set himself up as the
antithesis, he was going to be the 'decider,' and they
embraced him."

Martelly also positioned himself as a friend to U.S.
business interests, which won him support from right-
wing think tanks like the Center for Strategic and
International Studies. A conservative Washington
operative named Damian Merlo, who advised John McCain on
foreign affairs in 2008, became Martelly's campaign
manager. The U.S. consultant quickly reshaped the
candidate's image, replacing the flamboyant "Sweet
Micky" with the more sober "Michel Martelly," whose
conservative blue suits, red ties and reading glasses
spoke of a serious candidate promising a "results-
oriented presidency" focused on fighting government
corruption and restoring order to Port-au-Prince.

With a sudden influx of $6 million into his campaign
from American backers and the Haitian diaspora - and
with Haiti's largest political party excluded from the
vote, effectively disenfranchising a large swath of the
poor - Martelly won in a landslide. Many Haitians,
however, questioned the legitimacy of the elections, and
America's role in determining the outcome. "For the
U.S., elections have no meaning other than to create the
image that Haiti is democratically run," fumes Alex
Dupuy, author of The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, the International Community and Haiti. "The
interest of the U.S. in Haiti is to have a government
that is compliant. They pushed for Martelly, and now
they are expecting him to do their bidding - and he is."

Martelly was inaugurated as Haiti's 56th president on
May 14th, in a ceremony in front of the still-shattered
National Palace. In his inaugural speech, he made a
point of saying that Haiti, as he put it, was now "open
for business." A few days later, he nominated his friend
Daniel Rouzier, the top executive of the private energy
company E-Power, to serve as his prime minister. A
graduate of Georgetown and Dartmouth, Rouzier is a
member of Haiti's new cosmopolitan elite, one interested
less in politics than in fully integrating Haiti into
the global economy.

Shortly after being nominated, Rouzier announced that
Haiti would disband the Interim Haiti Recovery
Commission, which he dismissed as "dysfunctional." His
assessment concurred with the findings of the U.S.
Government Accountability Office, which noted in a
report released in May that the IHRC was "not fully
operational" more than a year after its creation. Nor
will it likely ever be, the GAO suggested, as the
commission's charter was set to expire this October. "I
don't mean to crucify the people who came up with the
concept," Rouzier said, "but sometimes when something
doesn't work, you have to fix it."

Hours after Rouzier blasted the IHRC, however,
Martelly's office rushed to walk back the criticism,
maintaining that the Haitian government remains "very
open and willing to begin discussions" to make the IHRC
"more efficient." In July, when Martelly agreed to a
year's extension for the relief commission, the message
was clear: The U.S. government and private-sector
interests like Digicel had found a friendly ally in the
new Haitian president.

Rouzier's nomination was ultimately blocked by the
Haitian Parliament, which is controlled by rival
parties, and Haiti remains without a prime minister - a
political vacuum that has only increased the sway of the
private sector and the IHRC. In June, Martelly kicked
off a project called Building Back Better Communities,
funded in part by the Clinton Foundation, which seeks to
construct 400 new homes in 100 days, using designs and
structural engineering provided almost solely by foreign
firms. The following month, he unveiled a plan,
conceived by Miami architect Andrés Duany and sponsored
by Britain's Prince Charles, to rebuild downtown Port-
au-Prince as a series of "urban villages," each with its
own separate condominiums and neighborhood-watch
committees. The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, which raised
$50 million earmarked specifically for emergency-relief
efforts, meanwhile, raised eyebrows by investing $2
million to finish the construction of a luxury hotel in
Pétionville. The 130-room Oasis "symbolizes Haiti
'building back better' and sends a message to the world
that Haiti is open for business," declared Paul Altidor,
vice president of the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund. "For
Haiti's recovery to be sustainable," he added, "it must
attract investors, businesses and donors, all of whom
will need a business-class, seismically safe hotel."

Haitians, however, know from bitter experience that the
business-friendly model of development currently being
touted as their salvation has repeatedly failed them in
the past. In the 1970s and 1980s, during Haiti's
industrial heyday, tens of thousands of rural residents
flocked to Port-au-Prince in search of jobs. Many
settled in Cité Soleil, an isolated shantytown on the
edge of the city that had been created to house workers
for the type of factories located in the so-called
"export processing zone," much like the one that was
promised to the thousands of Haitians who flocked to
Corail. But the factories soon closed in the midst of
Haiti's political upheaval, and today Cité Soleil is the
capital's largest and most notorious slum, one of the
poorest and most desperate places in the Western
Hemisphere. There are few Digicel banners here, and the
ghetto is considered a "red zone," too dangerous for
most relief agencies to enter. A few workers from
Doctors Without Borders have struggled to contain the
flow of cholera into Cité Soleil's lone hospital.

To veteran Haiti watchers, Cité Soleil offers a stark
lesson in the danger of relying on grandiose notions
about the largesse and staying power of the private
sector. "If you want to see what Haiti will look like in
20 years, all you have to do is go down to Cité Soleil,"
says Schwartz, the anthropologist. "In the past 50
years, very little has changed in Haiti. There is
absolutely no reason to believe that the projects the
international community is building today are any
different. Maybe even worse." Recently, Schwartz was out
looking at the new T-shelters being built in Corail -
essentially tiny plywood boxes with tin roofs. "They
look like rows and rows of garden sheds," he says. "What
do you think this is going to look like in 10 years? You
don't need a degree in urban planning to anticipate a
new Cité Soleil. If you want to understand the future,
just look at the past."

During the past decade, Cité Soleil has been the site of
Haiti's worst gang warfare, and the young men who live
here remain stigmatized by the violence. "When you say
you come from Cité Soleil, people think you are a
gangster or a kidnapper," says a 32-year-old Haitian
rapper named Tche-Ke, whose brother, in fact, was a
notorious gangster. Tche-Ke eschews violence and spends
whatever money he makes from his music and other odd
jobs on neighborhood kids, 10 of whom he is putting
through school. Despite being spared in the earthquake,
much of the slum is paved with crumbling asphalt, and
some areas remain submerged under several feet of mud.
Green slime coats the puddles, and strewn across an open
field, a cornucopia of garbage and broken glass goes
unnoticed by the Haitian children who use one part of it
as a soccer field, another part as a toilet. "Do you
smell it?" asks Tche-Ke. The stench is overpowering.

At the end of one muddy path is a tiny makeshift shack,
where a young mother named Denise lives with her two
toddlers and 10,000 flies. Like many Haitians I meet,
Denise says she has faith: Jesus will soon give her a
new home. Then she points to a somewhat larger shack
next to hers - a roofless hut fashioned from a USAID
tarp draped over some plywood. With no money to finish
it and no job, she struggles to scrape together the $10
a month in rent she pays for the privilege of living in
her shack.

This, then, is the legacy that decades of foreign
investment have bestowed on Haiti: a brutal and
intractable poverty, borne of a disastrous mix of well-
intentioned aid and profit-driven development. Every
decade or so, it seems, the world comes up with a bold
new plan for saving Haiti - and each ultimately proves
as ineffective and fleeting as the last.

As Denise talks, a pig snuffles in the dirt next to her
infant son, who is gravely malnourished. A large white
UNICEF vehicle, a rare sight in the neighborhood, drives
slowly past. A woman from the relief agency peers out of
the window, her expression one part revulsion and
another part fear.

Then she moves on.

___________________________________________

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